Why have seven Prime Ministers come and gone in little more than a decade? Is Britain simply producing weaker political leaders, or is something much deeper going wrong?
In this video, I argue that the real story is not about personalities or competence. Instead, I suggest that the United Kingdom has been trying to govern with a political and economic model that effectively collapsed after the financial crisis of 2008.
The banking crisis did not just expose failures in the City of London. It also revealed the limits of an economic system built around finance, tax havens, neoliberalism and the legacy of Britain’s imperial past. Since then, every Prime Minister has inherited impossible political constraints:
promises of growth without investment,
better public services without funding, and
national unity while the four nations of the UK increasingly pursue different political futures.
I also explore why the constitutional settlement is beginning to unravel, why Westminster seems unable to respond, and why simply replacing one Prime Minister with another will not solve Britain’s problems.
If the UK is to thrive again, I argue that we need a new constitutional settlement, an economy that works for people rather than finance, and a new politics built around care and hope.
This is the audio version:
The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.
This is the transcript:
I have now lived through sixteen Prime Ministers. Andy Burnham is the sixteenth, but the seventh in the last decade. And of those sixteen Prime Ministers, nine, like Andy Burnham, have arrived on the job without ever having won an election. There are lots of questions that arise from that, but the obvious and most important one, which many people are asking, is: are we now producing worse leaders because we seem to get through them at a rate of knots?
A poor Prime Minister, like John Major, who was generally considered to be second-rate, served for seven years in the 1990s and won a general election.
Now they don’t seem to be able to last two years at best. Liz Truss only managed weeks.
So, is there something deeply wrong with the people who are becoming Prime Minister, or is there something else that is deeper and more seriously broken in the UK? I think we need to look at that and answer that second question because it’s more important than the first.
I’m not talking here about competence. We know we have had good, bad, and indifferent Prime Ministers over my lifetime. Good ones? Well, most people would say Margaret Thatcher, certainly the most influential. Tony Blair won three general elections. In my lifetime, Harold Wilson won four, and so there are Prime Ministers who have, in their own terms, been highly successful.
There’ve also been the weak ones. I’ve already mentioned John Major. Jim Callaghan was another one. But Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, they’ve been outright disasters. And as for Keir Starmer, well, his own party has turfed him out after two years, after winning what was called a landslide general election.
Competence is an issue, but I think there is something much more important to look at. It is not just the issue of competence that explains today’s instability. There is something more fundamental that has changed in the last decade or so, and I think it all changed after 2008. That was the real turning point as far as I’m concerned. The global financial crisis of that year changed far more than our banking system here in the UK.
It didn’t just change our economy either. It exposed deep weaknesses in the UK’s economic and political model. Those weaknesses were hidden before 2008. They’ve become more obvious as time has passed ever since, and now they’re impossible to ignore. Every Prime Minister since 2008 has inherited the legacy of that debacle, that meltdown, that failure of the City of London to manage its own affairs, and the subsequent need for the state to bail it out. And none of them has known what to do as a consequence. This is the failure that we are really talking about.
The reality was that the old British constitutional settlement was exhausted by 2008.
Britain had relied on the legacy of empire.
It had relied on the dominance of the City of London as the hub of finance, not for the whole world maybe, but a major part of it.
It had relied on tax havens to keep its old economic reach and to control large money flows that had previously come from colonies.
It had relied on a belief in British exceptionalism, and those foundations were all shattered in 2008.
The world turned on tax havens. The world realised that the City of London was not good for its word, and it was the government that had to bail it out. The world realised that we were no longer a major economic or colonial power. The illusions were shattered, and yet politicians still govern as though everything remains as it was before that crash happened.
But the reality is, there have been signs of this change. Let’s take one example. The union that underpins the United Kingdom is changing. Scotland has increasingly followed its own political path since 2008, and Wales is now doing the same. Northern Ireland has its own constitutional dynamic. And in all three of these countries, three of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom, there are governments now led by parties committed to leaving the United Kingdom.
That was unthinkable in 2008, and now it’s reality. What that means is that England can no longer assume one political future fits everyone inside this supposed United Kingdom, which feels anything but that the moment you leave England.
2008 also exposed the weaknesses in the neoliberal model. Whatever the upside had been before 2008, neoliberalism made everything worse at that time and since. Since 2008, governments have relied on austerity. Public services have steadily weakened. Inequality has grown. Living standards have stagnated. Hope has become harder to find.
But the neoliberal constraints have not been relaxed. British Prime Ministers since 2015, when all of these changes were becoming clear, have inherited impossible choices.
They promise growth, but they can’t change the economy.
They promise better services, but they can’t provide the investment required.
They promise unity, but the nations of the United Kingdom are drifting apart, and we’ve left the European Union.
They promised hope whilst managing decline.
No Prime Minister can succeed on these terms, but they are the ones that the neoliberal dogma requires of them. Neoliberalism has been designed to stop Prime Ministers functioning in the way that is necessary to ensure that they can govern this very weird combination of states that makes up the United Kingdom. Their task is now impossible within the framework in which we are sitting.
And let’s be clear, we have, as a consequence, a full-blown identity crisis in the UK. Britain no longer has a shared national purpose. The old political sentiment has run its course. We’ve seen that. We’ve seen the rise of Nigel Farage and his populist parties. We have seen the challenges to government that that has given rise to. We’ve seen the rise of the Greens.
The question is no longer: who governs? The question is, what is Britain? What should it become, and what does it want to achieve? That debate can no longer be avoided. But every single Prime Minister since 2010 has done their very best to avoid every aspect of those questions, denying the fact that there are questions which are more important than the ones they have chosen to look at, and that is why they’ve failed.
Any Prime Minister who does not talk about the issues that I’ve just outlined is going to fail.
We do need a different future.
We do need to talk about it.
We need a new constitutional settlement; we need to talk about that.
We might need to be a different country. And that issue is never addressed by Prime Ministers in Westminster. It might be in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but not here.
And we need, at the same time, to recognise that whatever the state that emerges from this situation might be, it will have a very different place in the world.
We need, at the same time, an economy that works for everyone. An economy that works for everyone in England, in Wales, in Scotland, and in Northern Ireland, and what works for everyone in each of those places might be different.
Most of all, we need to replace neoliberalism because the dominance of finance within our economies only makes sense within the United Kingdom and only makes sense in a country dominated by the City of London. And it doesn’t seem as though any of the countries that make up the United Kingdom want such a structure anymore. We need a politics of care. We need an economics of hope.
Prime Minister number sixteen is not then the real story today. The real story is of a political settlement that has reached the end of the line. Its limits have been appreciated. We know we must move on. And we know that unless we confront that reality, Prime Minister number seventeen will face exactly the same crises as Prime Minister number sixteen, oh, and 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 have done as well.
Unless Andy Burnham realises this, Prime Minister number seventeen is waiting in the wings, looking for their chance to fail as he will unless he addresses these issues.
So, what is the next chapter?
The identity question has to be resolved. What country are we? We do need independence referendums to resolve that issue, and we need them more than once in some cases, because Wales might not be ready for independence now, but to pretend that this is a decision that can be made once and once only is quite ridiculous. We live in a fast-moving world. These decisions will change over time. We need to be able to address the reality of whether we are a single country or not.
Each of our nations does need to choose its own future. If it wants to be in the United Kingdom, so be it. That’s fine. Let the people decide. That’s the point. The age of one Westminster solution is, however, ending, whatever happens. There do need to be strong devolved governments, even if there isn’t independence, and politics must always put people before finance. Without a doubt, that is the biggest change that we need of all.
Every nation deserves the opportunity to build the future its people choose, and until Prime Ministers address that desire, we’re stuck in this continual flow of failed Prime Ministers, none of whom will put their heads above the parapet and ask the essential question: what are we going to do to address the problems we have? How many more will it take before we do finally get to the point where we will really talk about what is necessary? I would love it if Andy Burnham did this, but I’m not living in hope.
That’s my opinion. What’s yours? There’s a poll down below. Let us have your comments. Please do share this video. Please do like it. Please do subscribe and hit the bell button as well, because that will guarantee you continue to get messages from us. And if you’d like to make a donation to buy Tom and me coffee, that will be great.
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